Molly Pesce Back On Florida Scene In 'Svengali'

Five years ago her name was in the news often as the outspoken Miss Florida, the Altamonte Springs native who couldn't help being blunt about then-Miss America Kellye Cash.

Two years ago she turned up on the Nickelodeon channel under the stage name Molly Scott, hosting a variety show for kids called Total Panic and interviewing, in her words, ''everyone from Sigourney Weaver to Weird Al Yankovic.''

Now Molly is in the theater, playing an androgynous Parisian called Zou Zou in the Asolo Theatre Company's production of the new musical Svengali - and appearing to better effect than nearly everyone else onstage.

Performing with Pesce, 28, in the Asolo's production is her sister Blake, 19, who - as Susan Pesce - sang and danced in the choruses of several Central Florida theater companies during her earlier teen-age years. In the Asolo playbill, the tall, lanky, gorgeous Pesce sisters are billed as Molly Scott and Blake Scott.

Now the two graduates of Lake Brantley High School are both trying to make it in show business. Molly has just finished a short run in an off-Broadway revival of Georgy, the 1970 musical adaptation of the movie Georgy Girl. And Blake, who just graduated from New York University, is playing her first role on a professional theater stage.

It has been four years since Molly Pesce handed over the Miss Florida crown and let down her hair (which, judging from her remarks about Kellye Cash, was never very far up to begin with). After briefly performing a one-woman show to raise money for several Central Florida charities and playing the lead in the Mark Two Dinner Theater production of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Pesce headed offto New York with the intention of getting on the stage.

She did commercials for Tropicana orange juice, Joy dishwashing liquid and GMC trucks. She married longtime boyfriend Tim Hogue, whom she met when both performed with Up With People and who is now a businessman. And she auditioned, again and again.

Eventually the work came - 1 1/2 years as co-host of Total Panic; a continuing job as host of Inside Scoop, a series of one-minute spots about the movie industry which is broadcast on such shows as The Arsenio Hall Show; one of the leading roles this summer in Georgy. And Pesce made the contacts that got her a principal role in Svengali.

That show, she says, is something of a family affair: Its star, Linda Eder, is one of Pesce's closest friends, and Jason Workman, who plays the young romantic lead, was in Pesce and Hogue's wedding. Pesce met composer Frank Wildhorn years ago, and she says he has tried to work her into his shows ever since. Scheduling conflicts kept her from doing Wildhorn's Jekyll & Hyde or Svengali in their first productions in Houston. But a part that was originally male in the Houston production was rewritten as a female role, and now Pesce is playing Zou Zou in a show that Wildhorn says is heading for New York in the fallof 1993.

In the meantime, Blake - who just returned from several months studying acting at the Shepkin Institute in Moscow as part of her NYU theater program - auditioned for Svengali in Miami and was cast as the only non-Asolo Conservatory member of the chorus. She's currently battling with whether to call herself Pesce or Scott.

Svengali, Molly says, has been rewritten in a major way since its Houston production: 60 percent of the show, she says, is new. The result was that the cast had to learn all the new material in a 10-day rehearsal period: ''It was unbelievable,'' she says.

When the show closes Nov. 2, Blake will move in with Molly and her husband on New York's Upper West Side and begin looking for jobs in the theater. And Molly will return to New York and her work with Triple Play, a three-member improvisational comedy group that performs musical improvisation, with a piano player, at such clubs as Catch a Rising Star. She's hoping to break into TV sitcoms, and she's hoping, as always, to do more theater.

Still, both of them know that hopes are just that.

''It's a tenuous business,'' Molly says. ''People who've won Tony Awards are not working. Getting an off-Broadway show now is a major coup.